A communiqué from Mikko Honkala announces the version 0.31 'prototype ' release of X-Smiles, an Open Source Java-based XML Browser for exotic devices. X-Smiles has been produced as part of a non-profit project started by the Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology. Mikko writes: "X-Smiles is a pure Java XML browser intended for both desktop use and embedded network devices and to support multimedia services. It is capable of displaying documents written in various XML languages. Currently supported languages include: (1) Extensible Markup Language - XML; (2) XSL Transformations - XSLT; (3) XSL Formatting Objects - XSL FO; (4) Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language 1.0 - SMIL; (5) XML Forms - XForms; (6) Scalable Vector Graphics - SVG. Some of these XML standards are supported by integrated free third party libraries while others are delivered in the X-Smiles project. Other supported features include ECMAScript, multimedia content in SMIL through Java Media Framework (JMF), and various GUIs. The main advantage of the X-Smiles browser is that it supports several XML related specifications and is still suitable for embedded devices supporting the Java environment. X-Smiles should be suitable for small embedded devices supporting Java; this goal includes porting X-Smiles to Kaffe VM. Currently Kaffe supports Java 1.1, while some X-Smiles features are based on Java 1.2."

"X-Smiles is a non-profit project started by the Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology. It was first conceived in a student software project in 1998-1999. Since it has been developed by the staff of the laboratory in the GO project. X-Smiles was released as open source in the beginning of the year 2001."